As Yvette Cooper discovered, women can pay a heavy price for taking time off
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Glamorous parties, business-class flights and a designer wardrobe all used to be staples of Louisa Clark’s life. Clark, 43, worked in the entertainment industry for 15 years. When she went on maternity leave, her bosses told her to take as long as she liked.

But when Clark returned after nine months, the recession had started to bite. Her old boss had been sacked, new executives didn’t know her, and her old job title had vanished during “restructuring”. She was given a new title involving work in an unfamiliar area. Frustrated and stressed by office politics, within six months Clark felt she had no choice but to resign. But five years and another child later, she has been unable to find a job suited to her experience. Instead she’s working as an admin assistant for a friend’s business, earning the minimum wage.

“In hindsight, I fell for the 'yummy mummy’ propaganda that it would be marvellous to spend a long maternity leave going to baby yoga classes,” she says. “It was fun, but it also taught me that sitting on the floor playing with Plasticine wasn’t for me. I wish I’d taken six weeks off – then I’d have been back at work during the restructuring and able to fight my corner. Now I feel like I’m standing with my face pressed against a window, watching the world carry on without me.”

Louisa is far from the only woman to pay the price for a baby break. Last week, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that she felt “cut off” by Whitehall officials during her second maternity leave from being a minister.

Ms Cooper, wife of Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and mother of three, said the Communities Department, where she had been working as a minister, had been “very unsupportive” about keeping her updated with developments.

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“They almost tried to cut me off completely from everything,” she said, adding: “Lots of people will know the experience. When you’re on maternity leave, you’re trying to manage with a new baby. Feeling like you’ve got to have a fight at work for yourself can be a really hard thing to do.”

The Suffragettes flung themselves under horses in their quest for equal rights; the women’s libbers of the Sixties burnt their bras. Today, our increasingly generous maternity laws appear to have helped make their dreams come true. Successive governments’ determination to win female votes means that during the past 20 years, maternity leave has increased from six weeks to a year, with payment of some sort (benefits vary between employers) for the first nine months.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett is a leading campaigner for better maternity leave in the US (American women are allowed only 12 weeks unpaid), but admits that her country has far more women in top jobs than Europe, where more generous policies appear to be backfiring. Hewlett’s research for her book, Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, showed that a woman who took a total of more than two years off lost 18 per cent of her earning power forever. If she took three years off, this figure soared to 38 per cent. On the other hand, two maternity leaves of six months had little or no effect on a woman’s future earnings.

Hewlett also discovered that 37 per cent of professional women will drop out at some point in their careers, either to look after elderly relatives, or children – a situation not helped by contemporary pressures to be a “massively engaged” parent. Another third will take what she calls “a scenic route”, perhaps working part-time. But by trying to avoid what Hewlett calls the “male competitive model” of an unblemished record of service, they paid a huge price in terms both of their financial future and personal fulfilment. “Two-thirds of women are sideswiped, sidelined, pretty much for the rest of their lives, by this model,” she warns.

Yet, in the hormonal haze of new motherhood, many women deem such implications unimportant. “I was so dazed after Jack was born, for about a year I couldn’t imagine anything mattering more than getting him to sleep through the night,” says Sarah Cooper, 44, a former finance director with a multinational, who resigned shortly after returning from nine months’ maternity leave, because she was unhappy with having to make frequent business trips. Six years later, she has rediscovered her energy and ambition, but has applied for more than 20 jobs without success.

Many highly successful women have recognised that it is impossible to hold a top job and attend weekly song ’n’ rhyme times. Last year Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, caused outrage when she announced that she was planning only a few weeks’ maternity leave for her first child, and that she would “work throughout”. But in her rapidly evolving environment, how could Mayer have justified her $36 million salary otherwise?

Susan Singleton, 51, who runs the solicitors’ practice, Singletons, went back to work within days of giving birth to each of her five children, expressing breast milk for a year to feed the three eldest and having her nanny bring her twins to her desk to breastfeed when she was self-employed.

She believes that a long maternity leave has become a poisoned chalice for many women who lose contact with clients. “Today, too many younger women feel they have to take six months or a year off and they aren’t presented with the option that taking two or six weeks, or two or three months, is perfectly doable and may, in fact, be better for babies, women and families.”

In hindsight, Sarah Cooper, who now works 12 hours a week doing accounts for a local golf club (“an 18-year-old could do it”), is in no doubt that three months would have been “doable” for her. “If I could have my children again, I’d ignore the tempting opportunity of what I saw as a bit of a holiday, and accept that a huge chunk of my wages would start going on a nanny and that I might miss my child’s first steps.

“Does it make me sound hard-hearted? Yes, but resigning has put massive pressure on my husband as the sole breadwinner. The result is, he’s never home before nine, and the kids barely know him. Long maternity leave seemed too good to be true, and as it turned out, it was.”